ArsDigita
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ArsDigita was a web development company cofounded by Philip Greenspun, Tracy Adams, Ben Adida, Eve Andersson, Olin Shivers, Aure Prochazka, and Jin Choi and was started in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid-1990s. The company produced a popular Open Source toolkit, the ArsDigita Community System (ACS), for building database-backed community websites, and flourished at the peak of the Internet bubble. ACS was also the roots of OpenACS, which added PostgreSQL as a database option and gave the system a fully open-source stack.
The founders of the ArsDigita Corporation also set up a nonprofit organization, the ArsDigita Foundation, which sponsored a yearly programming contest for high school students and, in 2000, a free physical school teaching an intensive one-year course in undergraduate computer science.
Recruiting was touted heavily by Greenspun, and Ars Digita became notorious among the "elite geeks" as a place where recruiting could result in significant payoffs. During the spring of 1999, for example, recruiting 5 hires would earn the employee a Honda S2000. Recruiting 10 employees would net a Ferrari F355. A trophy F355 in bright yellow was kept parked outside of the Prospect Street office in Cambridge to entice employees into recruiting. Later in the summer of 1999, as new management was brought on board, the policy was quietly changed to a lease of the cars, not outright ownership.
Recruiting was performed nationally, with four tiers of hiring, ranging in salary from $80,000 to $150,000 annually. Potential recruits where required to pass a series of programming tests in the Tcl Programming Language. These problem sets included calculating Fibonacci sequences and other computer science tasks.
Approximately 180 Ars Digita employees were hired at the company's peak, but with the crash of the dot com, many of ArsDigita's clients went out of business. The weight of payroll and offices in Cambridge, Berkeley, California, Washington D.C., and Ann Arbor, Michigan soon overwhelmed the company. The Ann Arbor office was closed in September, 2000, with the other offices following over the next few months.
Employees at Ars Digita were treated incredibly well. The Cambridge office, for example, had a full stocked kitchen on each floor, and a full game room with a pinball machine. Each employee desk was outfitted with an Aeron chair, two Sun Microsystems 17" Flat Panel Monitors, and a VOIP telephone.
ArsDigita took $38 million in venture capital investment from Greylock and General Atlantic in 2000 to provide working capital for expansion of its product line. Greenspun claims that the venture capitalists staged an internal coup to drive the founders out of the management structure and installed incompetent professional managers with little idea of how to run a technical company, resulting in the collapse of the company[1] and a lawsuit between the founding shareholders and the venture capitalists over control of management.[1] The lawsuit was settled out of court on undisclosed terms. Later, it was revealed by Eve Andersson that Greenspun received approximately $7.6 million, while the other founders received nothing.
In 2002, ArsDigita's main assets were acquired by Red Hat.[2]
ArsDigita is unrelated to Ars Technica, despite the similarity in name.
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